Meet the titans of finance, tech and philanthropy funding New York’s socialist surge

Rising support for socialism in the city is rankling members of the business community, but the movement’s biggest financial supporters are coming from their own ranks.

A Crain’s analysis of the financial base of the three most prominent socialists in New York politics—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, state Sen. Julia Salazar and Tiffany Cabán, who lost the Queens district attorney primary by just 55 votes—reveals a startling pattern: All three drew substantial support from finance, technology and nonprofit leaders. This is a marked divergence from the city’s real estate industry, which generally supported their Democratic primary opponents.

Ocasio-Cortez, Salazar and Cabán are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, a former fringe group that advocates massive redistribution of wealth and public ownership of broad sectors of the economy. Collectively, they have pushed these concepts into the city’s political discourse and forced the Democratic Party to tack left.

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Conversations with their contributors shed light on the motivations of donors whose career and personal net worth would ostensibly suffer under such policies: Pervasive cultural liberalism, particularly among young people residing in elite neighborhoods, and the shocking triumph of President Donald Trump’s nativist campaign in 2016 have driven a generation of investors, heirs and entrepreneurs toward the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Silicon socialists

Political observers have noted the tech sector’s liberal proclivities for more than a decade, but no figure better embodies the field’s growing radicalization than Saikat Chakrabarti, who helped get Ocasio-Cortez elected last year and until recently was her chief of staff. Chakrabarti, a 2007 Harvard graduate, worked briefly for hedge fund Bridgewater before relocating to San Francisco, where he co-created web design tool Mockingbird and helped build the online payment-services firm Stripe.

But in 2015 the millionaire capitalist abandoned the startup scene to join the campaign of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders—the first significant democratic socialist candidate for president in generations and the idol of Chakrabarti’s fellow millennials. After Sanders lost the nomination, the entrepreneur and several fellow Sanders staffers started the groups Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, which recruited Ocasio-Cortez to challenge then-Rep. Joseph Crowley.

This year, while still working for the rookie congresswoman, Chakrabarti donated $3,000 to Cabán’s campaign from his apartment in the West Village. He was one of many figures who did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.

He’s far from alone in his leftist inclinations, though. Tumblr founder David Karp and Edmund Resor, vice president of software company Defentect Group—both New Yorkers—gave the maximum, $2,700, to Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign last year. Ross Boucher, a colleague of Chakrabarti’s at Stripe and the co-founder of Motorola-acquired startup 280 North, donated $1,200. Thomas Lehman, co-founder of the website Genius, threw in $1,000, as did his fellow Brooklynite Brian O’Kelley, CEO of AppNexus.

Crain’s found that in the most recent filing period, Ocasio-Cortez raked in thousands more from professionals in the tech industry, including employees of ABB, Google, IBM, NimbleBit and SpaceX. While many were based on the West Coast—the congresswoman actually received more donations from California than from New York—a number were residents of the five boroughs.

The tech sector also has smiled upon Salazar and Cabán. The largest individual donor to the former has been Christian Rudder, founder of dating site OKCupid, who lives in the senator’s northern Brooklyn district.
Cabán, who raised $922,000 overall, received $55,000 from the wife of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, $5,000 from the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs and $1,000 from the wife of Zillow and Expedia founder Rich Barton. An additional $5,500 for the previously unknown public defender came from Eric Silverberg, founder of gay dating app Scruff, who appears to have sent two of the checks from his company’s office near Bryant Park.

One Brooklyn-based startup founder said most of the 40 to 50 attendees at a fundraiser he held for Salazar last year hailed from his field. The entrepreneur asked to speak anonymously because he has sold his company and now holds a significant role at a multinational tech giant.

He said he does not see himself as a socialist, much less a self-proclaimed Marxist like Salazar. But he said his experience as an employer led him to favor replacing for-profit health insurance, a move he observed that only socialist candidates championed until recently.

“I largely agree with what democratic socialists stand for,” he said. “As an entrepreneur, I wish we had single-payer health care because then we would only have to focus on wages and not benefits.”

The techie noted that Cabán, Ocasio-Cortez and Salazar drew votes largely from Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick in Brooklyn and from Long Island City, Astoria and Ridgewood in Queens—gentrifying areas favored by the sort of affluent millennials involved in the cutting-edge economy. Compared with their counterparts on the West Coast, he argued, innovators in New York are better integrated into the urban fabric and more dependent on public resources such as the subway system.

Further, many shared their peers’ enthusiasm about the Sanders campaign in 2016—and their horror at Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton.

“That’s an identity thing. There’s a clustering of like-minded people,” he said. “To be told you can’t have all these things because you need to be pragmatic, only to have pragmatism lose to Trump, changed a lot of New Yorkers.”

Asked if high-earning tech entrepreneurs and employees are ready to accept the redistribution of their own wealth, the Salazar donor said, “That’s a really good question—if anybody has data on the answer to that, I’d love to see it.”

Wall Street welcomed

Eight years after the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park, outrage at investment bankers among New York City leftists has given way to vitriol toward developers and landlords. Ocasio-Cortez, Salazar and Cabán all portrayed their opponents as tools of the Real Estate Board of New York and pledged not to take donations from the industry. They made no such commitment about financial-sector money.

Chakrabarti was hardly the only financier in 2018 to take an interest in Ocasio-Cortez, whose fundraising prowess skyrocketed after her upset victory over the powerful Crowley. The 20something insurgent received $2,700 from Wolfgang Wander of Long Island–based Renaissance Technologies, Adam Blumenthal of Manhattan’s Blue Wolf Capital and Amed Khan of Paradigm Global Group in Rockland County.

Large sums also came from New York venture capitalists who straddle the worlds of finance and technology: $2,700 from Gregory Gunn of Lingo Ventures, and $1,000 from his business partner Lisette Nieves; $1,000 from Spencer Adler of SynBio Investors; and, this year, $2,650 from Edge/Harris Ventures co-founder Michael Meyer. Attorneys and employees of Skadden Arps, known for representing financial power players in New York and across the planet, donated several thousand dollars more.

But even this haul looks puny compared to the cash the so-called Masters of the Universe lavished on Cabán, taking full advantage of the lax regulation of district attorney races. Her campaign collected $30,000 from Goldman Sachs and Fortress Investment Group alumnus Michael Novogratz, who now helms cryptocurrency merchant bank Galaxy Digital from an office on the Lower East Side.

This phenomenon is not wholly new, said Salazar donor Enrique Diaz-Alvarez, who serves as chief risk officer at Ebury, a financial-services and lending firm that helps small and midsize businesses reach global markets.

Diaz-Alvarez, an occasional contributor to socialist magazine Jacobin, noted that Wall Street giants such as JPMorgan Chairman Jamie Dimon and former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein have long identified as Democrats and historically directed most of their donations to Democratic candidates.

Just as in the Democratic Party, the finance community has always had far-left figures—and like many others they became more vocal and organized after Trump won and Republicans won majorities in both houses of Congress.

“Anodyne, moderate, centrist Democratic candidates failed so spectacularly in 2016,” said the native of Spain, who described himself as a European-style social democrat. “The conventional wisdom that the way to win elections is by moving to the center and nominating the most centrist candidate possible has been upended, and I think that voices to the left everywhere—and in particularly in places like finance—have won quite a newfound respect.”

Diaz-Alvarez suggested the liberal-left tendency in the finance sector derives in part from the unique perspective it has on the lopsided distribution of wealth in America. But it also stems from its internationalist orientation.

“There’s an element, I think, of cosmopolitanism in finance, in the sense of strong ties abroad,” he said. “Most left people I know in finance are either immigrants like myself or have deep ties to people in other countries and other cultures.” Ebury’s slogan captures this attitude: “What borders?”

Notably, another of Salazar’s financial-sector donors was Han Yik, the New York–based head of institutional investors for the World Economic Forum, which hosts the famous pro-globalization gathering each year in Davos, Switzerland.

But Diaz-Alvarez said few of his fellow Financial District denizens would be pleased if Ocasio-Cortez or Salazar managed to pass a confiscatory tax regime. The congresswoman has called for a 70% levy on income above $10 million.

“In my experience, that’s where their liberalism ends: As soon as any significant redistribution is in sight, they turn very quickly toward the center,” he remarked.

The nonprofit motive

The only sector more generous to Democrats than finance, Diaz-Alvarez posited, is the nonprofit world. It too seems to have begun to tilt further leftward—creating perfect storms of money and support that have rained down on Ocasio-Cortez, Cabán and Salazar.

The phenomena has involved not just explicitly political nonprofits like Make the Road Action Fund, which ran outreach efforts on behalf of Salazar and Cabán, but officials at city’s private hospitals and universities, who donated profusely to all three of the socialist sensations.

A number of sizable contributions also came from individuals in charge of personal or family foundations. Ocasio-Cortez received the maximum gift last year from both Amy Goldman Fowler—daughter of billionaire real estate investor Sol Goldman and trustee of both her own eponymous foundation and the Lillian Goldman Charitable Trust—and from her husband.
Westchester-based philanthropist and angel investor Evan Segal, who runs a foundation that bears his and his wife’s names, was among the congresswoman’s earliest big donors in 2018 and showered a combined $8,900 upon her and Salazar.

Cabán got $5,500 from Eileen Farbman, who appears to run the family foundation started by her father, New York GOP operative– turned–telecom mogul Robert Price. An additional $2,000 for the district attorney runner-up came from Deborah Sagner, president of the Sagner Family Foundation, which shares the wealth created by late New Jersey real estate developer and Port Authority Chairman Alan Sagner. Deborah Sagner also gave a smaller amount to Ocasio-Cortez.

Cabán also benefited from an independent effort called Better Prosecutors for New York, which promoted her candidacy. The $40,000 behind the advertising endeavor came from Brooklyn-based brothers Jascha and Michael Hoffman, who sit on the board of the Sarnat-Hoffman Family Foundation, the legacy of their grandfather, famed plastic surgeon Bernard Sarnat.

But few donors better illustrate how and why nonprofit leaders funnel generational private wealth toward left-wing causes than Leah Hunt-Hendrix. The 36-year-old is the granddaughter of late Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, famed as an arch-conservative Republican and one of the richest men in the world. But Hunt-Hendrix grew up on the Upper East Side, far removed from Lone Star State drilling culture. She described her mother as an activist, fierce feminist and personal friend to Gloria Steinem.

Drawn toward left-leaning scholarship at Duke and Princeton, she returned to New York in the early 2010s and fell in with circles of philanthropists and activists just before the outbreak of Occupy Wall Street. Her experiences in that protest led her to found her first political nonprofit organization in 2012: Solidaire, which its website describes as “a membership community of people with wealth who are committed to supporting progressive social movements.”

She left the group in 2017 to co-found Way to Win, which she said uses wealthy contributors’ money to intervene in local primaries and “transform the Democratic Party.” Hunt-Hendrix has donated $3,400 directly to Ocasio-Cortez and Cabán—but Way to Win allocated a whopping $75,000 toward the latter’s recount fight, after tight margins in the district attorney primary left the outcome in dispute.

In an interview she reported an explosion in political engagement among her peers since Trump’s election, especially in New York and the Bay Area, where she now lives. But most, she said, are not interested in a broadly more egalitarian society.

“Obviously 2016 mobilized a lot of people, and inspired a lot of wealthy people to get involved in politics who hadn’t been involved before,” Hunt-Hendrix said. “But it’s still rare to find people who want to try to change the system beyond Trump.”

Still, she was far more optimistic than other people Crain’s interviewed about the ability of the 1% to accept wealth redistribution.

“I think there may be more and more defectors, more and more people who see the cracks in the system,” she said. “Their lives will be fine or even better in a world of greater equality.”

Crain’s New York Business is the trusted voice of the New York business community—connecting businesses across the five boroughs by providing analysis and opinion on how to navigate New York’s complex business and political landscape.